Drobo B1200I overview

1Description

Designed for small and medium businesses (SMB), the 54.6TB (9 x 6TB HDD, 3 x 200GB SSD) B1200i 12-Bay iSCSI NAS Server from Drobo helps provide reliable, high-performance, and self-optimizing storage for server virtualization, email, and data protection. It is able to integrate into TCP/IP networks using its four Gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which is reserved for management, and utilizes the iSCSI protocol to provide simple and powerful storage for your IT environment.

The Drobo B1200i has twelve 3.5" drive bays which are able to support twelve SATA III/II/I hard drives, twelve SAS II/I hard drives, or up to three 2.5" solid state drives and up to nine hard drives. While the drive bays are 3.5", no tools or carriers are required for 2.5" drives. Within its twelve drive bays, this Drobo B1200i is equipped with 9 x 6TB hard drives and 3 x 200GB SSDs, for a total storage capacity of 54.6TB. As SSDs are able to operate with faster data transfer speeds, Data-Aware Tiering migrates the most frequently accessed data to the SSDs, while less accessed data is stored on the hard drives.

The Drobo B1200i has also been built on BeyondRAID technology. If there are any empty drive bays, BeyondRAID allows additional drives to be inserted into the array, where they will be automatically configured. If all drive bays are occupied, simply replace the smallest capacity drive with a larger one and BeyondRAID will handle the rest. BeyondRAID is also what allows drives of varying capacities to work in the same unit, which helps enable future expansion as larger drives become available.

Built with a 3U rackmount form factor and controlled using Drobo's Dashboard software, the B1200i is powered using dual redundant and hot-swappable 100/240 VAC power supplies that operate at 8/5A and 50/60 Hz. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, Red Hate Enterprise Linux, and WMware vSphere. Included are 2 x 6' power cords with power supplies and rackmount parts. This NAS Array is protected by a limited 1-year warranty.

Drobo Dashboard

Drobo Dashboard is the single tool to centrally manage all of your Drobos. Drobo Dashboard displays status as if all of your Drobos were right in front of you with the same status lights and capacity gauge that are on the front panel. All administration tasks are a single click away. Simply, it's an easy way to configure and manage business-class storage

BeyondRAID Technology

A Drobo B1200i iSCSI array can hold up to 72TB of raw storage. To expand the storage capacity of an array, BeyondRAID enables additional disk drives to be inserted into empty drive bays. These new drives will automatically and transparently be configured for use in the array without user intervention. However, if all drive bays are occupied, simply replace the smallest capacity drive with a higher capacity one and BeyondRAID will do the rest.

Unlike traditional RAID arrays, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo enables different drive capacities to work in the same unit. This enables future expansion as larger SAS and SATA drives become available. With Drobo, access to data is maintained while it protects against simultaneous drive failures

Hybrid Storage & Tiering

The Drobo B1200i moves beyond manually tuning an array for applications that have different storage requirements. Its ability to automatically tier frequently used transactional data from stored data that's seldom used enables businesses to consolidate storage resources, and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications.

When using the hybrid storage option, Drobo leverages high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs) and high-performance solid state drives (SSDs) to deliver an application-optimized storage solution that requires no manual tuning

Build an iSCSI SAN

Unfamiliar with iSCSI? iSCSI is a popular high-performance protocol for deploying storage networking technology in IT environments. The problem: it can be very complex to manage. The Drobo B1200i changes that by introducing zero-click iSCSI configuration for both Windows and Mac OS X servers.

With an iSCSI SAN, centralized storage is provided to each server over a high-speed Gigabit Ethernet network where it can be allocated or expanded instantaneously. Deploying a Drobo B1200i eases iSCSI adoption, simplifies administration, and allows you to consolidate storage so you have fewer devices to manage

Storage Pools

Drobo B1200i storage pools have increased as disk drive suppliers have grown the capacity of their Enterprise quality SAS and SATA drives. This Drobo supports a storage pool of 128TB

Smart Volumes & Thin Provisioning

Quickly create new volumes, up to 64TB in size and manage them with ease. The innovative and timesaving Smart Volumes management technology with Thin Provisioning integrated into the Drobo B1200i allows the creation of up to 255 volumes. These volumes pull storage from the common pool of disks rather than silo's of physical disks

Optimizing Business Applications

Similar to business applications, Drobo is well suited for building a server virtualization cluster, highly available email server, or scalable backup server. Drobo technology has been certified for VMware vSphere, Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam Backup environments

Designed for IT Environments

The B1200i has serviceable modular components: a removable controller card, dual-redundant and hot-swappable power supplies, and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit. You can source field replaceable units in advance, to protect against a single hardware component failure. This helps ensure maximum uptimes and delivers a higher level of availability demanded by virtualized IT environments